RIP Alf Stratford 31/1/1926 - 3/9/2017

My dearly loved Father in Law, died last month, which as you can imagine was a very sad time for our family.  I just can't believe how fast it was - Dad had a slight cough on the Monday,  on the Wednesday evening he was admitted to hospital with a chest infection and pneumonia and he died in the early hours of Sunday morning. He was 91.

My Father in Law had been a resident of a local nursing home - His house in Morwell, after being on the market for nearly a year had finally sold with the new owners to take possession at the end of September.  So, it was an extremely busy September, dealing with the funeral and of course having to pack up and clean out the house.  We got it all done in time - whew! We donated a lot of Neale's parent's  things and furniture to the Salvation Army. I also felt so bad about having to throw so many of their things out - nearly 60 years of memories etc. Neale and I were exhausted by the time we completed it all.  Obviously, cleaning out the house should have happened when my FIL entered the nursing home - but it was something that Neale refused to contemplate then. We've also  got lots of boxes stored here at home and in our storage locker that will need to be sorted through.  We're planning a big clean up and reorganisation of our garage and storage locker at the end of the year - psyching ourselves up for it!  

I read an article/book advertisement on facebook (?) about death cleaning.  There has been a book  written by a Scandinavian author.  Anyway the gist of it was as you get older you start preparing and decluttering and not buy into consumerism for the sake of it and only keeping the items that are meaningful.  I suppose it is another form of the Kondo cleaning that was all the rage several years back.

Jen